Dragons Made Me Do It: Episode #3: Dragonsong (1976)

Tequila Mockingbird: And welcome to Dragons Made Me Do It, one of potentially many podcasts about Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series.

Lleu: I’m Lleu, and I read today’s book first of any the Pern books, when I was about eight, listening to the audiobook.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I’m Tequila Mockingbird, and I never tried to run away from home, but if I had, this book might have been to blame.

Lleu: Today we’re talking about Dragonsong, which is the first good book in the Pern series.

Lleu: It’s…so much better than Dragonflight or Dragonquest. And there are a lot of reasons for this, that we’ll discuss. Dragonsong shifts us away, mostly, from the protagonists of the first two books. We are following a young woman named Menolly… “Young woman” — she’s a girl. She’s a 15-year-old girl, named Menolly, who is… an extremely gifted musician, and she has been trained one-on-one by the Harper — the trained guild musician — at her home Hold, an isolated fishing community called Half-Circle.

Tequila Mockingbird: Unfortunately, there’s some gender prejudice, and her father specifically — the head Holder of Half-Circle Sea Hold — doesn’t believe that girls should be allowed to be Harpers, and so when the old Harper dies and the new one is sent for, Menolly finds herself gradually segregated from music within her community, as her parents don’t want her to be doing that, and she responds by eventually running away to go live with a cave full of fire lizards.

Lleu: Fire lizards, as we briefly and somewhat disjointedly mentioned last time, are essentially miniature dragons, who we later learn were the original creatures from which dragons were created. They are also telepathic, they also can teleport, they also psychically bond with people…

Lleu: Yes. And they have some unusual quirks of memory that become more prominent as the series progresses. Menolly lives in a cave with fire lizards — with the nine fire lizards that she has fed and so psychically bonded with — for… an indefinite period of time.

Tequila Mockingbird: An unspecified period of time. And you do get a little bit, also, of her older brother and the new harper looking for her, and also the fire lizards.

Lleu: Then, she has gone out on an errand, essentially, and realizes too late that not being in the Hold anymore she doesn’t have access to the Threadfall timetables and so is caught out during Threadfall and she’s like, “There’s nowhere to hide; all I can do is run and try to get away from this, and maybe I can make it back to my cave and not potentially die if any Thread gets past the dragonriders who are burning it out of the sky.” She’s noticed; a dragonrider swoops down, picks her up, and takes her back to the Weyr…

Tequila Mockingbird: …and then we get a sequence where she’s in Benden Weyr, and we get a really fun look at the working-class angle of Benden Weyr: the people who run the kitchens and clean things up and are not dragonriders, and this culminates in the scene that we’ve already seen from Dragonquest, the Impressing[1] where Brekke is supposed to hypothetically Impress a new queen, but this time we get it from Menolly’s point of view. It’s revealed her identity, and she is selected to become a Harper by Masterharper Robinton, who is there for the party and meets her and her fire lizards.

Lleu: And then the book ends with her, kind of, tearfully agreeing, like, “Yes! Of course I’ll go back to the Harper Hall with you!” And then we learn more about that in the next book, which is also good.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s notable that this book is not — it’s not an adult book, both in the sense that our protagonist is a 15-year-old girl and in the sense that there are no sex scenes in this book!

Lleu: Menolly does — Menolly’’s first encounter with the fire lizards —

Lleu: — is while she is walking along the cliffs, ostensibly looking for edible herbs but really trying to get out of the stifling environment in the Hold. She sees fire lizards for the first time and is like, “Oh, my god, they are real!” And what she sees, she realizes, is a mating flight —

Lleu: — technically a lizard sex scene. However. It’s not the focus of the book. This book was published in 1976 by Atheneum, which is a children’s imprint, and you can tell. The construction of the book is quite different; the style of the narration I think is fairly markedly different, and it’s way better edited, frankly.

Tequila Mockingbird: So we were talking a little bit before we actually started about, would this be a YA book if it was published today? Or would it be middle grade? Both of which didn’t really exist in the ’70s. It was sort of, it’s a children’s book or it’s an adult book; those are your options. But it feels more like a middle grade book in its tone and in its style than a YA Book TM. But she is technically a teenager, so I think — I mean, I don’t know if it would be able to be published today, because they’re very picky about, like, if it’s a YA book, it has to be a YA book.

Lleu: Yeah. I think if this were to be published today it would have to be written completely differently.

Lleu: This book, I would say, is in the same category as Tamora Pierce’s Song as the Lioness.

Lleu: Some-, something that if it had been published 20 years later would have been written differently, as YA, but wasn’t. So it’s published as a children’s book; it’s meant to be read by children; it just deals with things that we now would think of as belonging to YA, but the line between, sort of, children’s fiction and teen fiction was much blurrier, um…

Tequila Mockingbird: And in a lot of interesting ways, I think, sort of, speculative fiction was what filled that gap.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m mostly remembering, my high school librarian, who was very elderly, was under the firm impression that all speculative fiction was for children. So she shelved all science fiction and fantasy in the middle school library instead of the high school library, and it was my unofficial job in middle school to go through — because I was reading all of it — and tell the middle school librarian, like, “A lady has sex with a tiger in this book; I’m not sure it’s appropriate for the fourth graders,” and Ms. M. would be like, “Yeah, I’m gonna pull that one off the” — ’cause it was just… all of — we had Mercedes Lackey, we had Andre Norton, we had pretty graphic sex scenes, and Ms. Allen was like, “Nope, nope, that’s for children.”

Lleu: Yeah, no, there was a… I forget which one; maybe it was Question Quest — one of Piers Anthony’s Xanth books, anyway, was in the fifth grade classroom library, and then I read it, ’cause I was working my way through a bunch of Piers Anthony books at the time, as I gather many —

Lleu: — people around that age do, for unfortunate reasons. And I… got to the end of it and I was like, “I’m just gonna hold onto this one, I think, and not give it back to the fifth grade library.”

Tequila Mockingbird: I love, also — I very clearly remember my thought process was like, “It’s fine for me, a fifth grader, to read this, but a fourth grader probably shouldn’t read this. This is probably too adult for them.”

Lleu: Classic. In any case, the age focus of this book is also, I think, what made it — so, this was my first introduction to Pern. We listened to a lot of audiobooks in the car, because everyone in my family gets horribly carsick, so we needed something to occupy our time in order to prevent us from reading or doing other things that would make us get carsick.

Lleu: At one point, just sort of in the normal, everyday course of things, the audiobook that Mom had picked out for driving to and from school was Dragonsong, and we started listening to it, and then we got home, and I took the cassette out, and I took the cassette back up to my room, and I kept listening to it, and then I came down later for dinner, and Mom was like, “Oh,” like, “…uhhh…” And I was like, “Yeah, I’ve been listening to the book.” And she was like, “Oh. I thought we were all going to listen to the book.” And I was like, “No. I’m listening to it.”

Lleu: So then I spent the next long time, really — I didn’t listen to music for a long time, but I always needed sound on in order to fall asleep and stay asleep. So I would listen to Dragonsong and Dragonsinger on repeat, incessantly, for a very long time, so I have large portions of both of these books effectively memorized. Not that I could recite them off the top of my head — mostly —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. See, I had the Chronicles of Narnia on cassette, and that was my, like —

Tequila Mockingbird: — fall asleep listening to. Which, uh, in retrospect, not as good a choice as Dragonsong would have been. But what can you do with what forms your psyche, you know?

Lleu: Yeah. You know how it is. Ups and downs. One of the things — speaking of things I have memorized — that we neglected to talk about in Dragonflight and realized belatedly, like, “Ugh, we should have talked about the epigraphs!” is the epigraphs. So, Dragonsong, and also Dragonflight, each chapter begins with an epigraph, that is a —

Tequila Mockingbird: It is part of the world-building of Pern that they’ve switched mostly to an oral system of education, because they can’t preserve paper records, and we’ll get to that in a later book in the series, a prequel. So what we have is what’s called these “teaching songs,” and part of the job of Harpers is to teach children these songs so that they will know things about what to do in case of Thread, but also their own cultural education and different roles in their society, and things like that.

Lleu: — which is something that was contested in Dragonflight: Lessa gets in arguments with people about whether a particular ballad is actually historical or not. (It is. More or less.) And continues to be a factor going forward.

Tequila Mockingbird: The fun thing about Dragonsong is that we start with the same clear teaching ballad work; in fact, the epigraph that opens is the same one that opened the first chapter of Dragonflight. It’s —

Tequila Mockingbird: “Drummer, beat, and piper, blow
Harper, strike, and soldier, go
Free the flame and sear the grasses
Till the dawning Red Star passes.”

Lleu: Um. There’s some references in later books that link it to that. So, the “Duty Song” is the, kind of, central teaching ballad.

Tequila Mockingbird: But then, as it progresses, we start to see — instead of standard teaching ballads, we start to get songs that Menolly is writing.

Tequila Mockingbird: And poems that she’s writing, until by the end of the book we’re starting to see more of her own creative stuff, which is really a fun way to transition that and to show her love of music and that she’s really talented, and it helps that —

Tequila Mockingbird: — Anne McCaffrey was very talented, and I definitely did used to make up tunes for them in my head —

Lleu: Or, actually, I set Menol-, I set Menolly’s song about the fire lizards to a different tune that I already knew, but I set some of the other things to…

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think that very much feels correct for Menolly, right? It’s this fun, joyful — and I definitely remember, reading this as a kid, feeling that kinship with her, in a way that, I don’t know that I was really identifying with Lessa. But Menolly’s just — yeah, she’s like you, and she wants to have a cool, psychic pet lizard, and her parents totally don’t understand her! And it felt very, same hat.

Lleu: Yeah. No, I definitely… God, they’re so good. And I genuinely think some of it is just really good poetry. Menolly’s mourning song for the elderly Harper who’s been the one thing who keeps her sane in this Hold environment that otherwise is extremely sexist and sees her engagement with music as an uncomfortable necessity — the Harper dies, and it’s gonna be a while till the new one comes, so I guess we’ll let Menolly teach — as long as she never does any of her own music, she just only teaches them the strict things. And so, her mourning is… that’s grief, to me. That’s what I think of. And also, amusingly, some time ago, was googling it when I was trying to verify my memory of it and discovered that someone at some point had published a poetry collection where they had included Menolly’s song for Petiron, given it some title of their own, and maybe changed one or two words here or there, and I was like —

Lleu: — why? What — why would you do this? And also, how did nobody catch this? But the answer is, I guess, people who are publishing small press poetry collections are maybe not super familiar, intimately familiar, with the poetry in Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, for some reason.[2]

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I think my favorite of hers — it’s her, I assume, reminiscing about being caught out during Threadfall, and it’s —

Tequila Mockingbird: “Then my feet took off and my legs went, too,
So my body was obliged to follow
Me with my hands and my mouth full of cress
And my throat too dry to swallow.”

Lleu: — we witness her composing this as she’s telling stories to the children at the Weyr, and she’s talking about how she was outrunning Thread, and she’s like, then she found herself kind of settling into a rhythm, and the words started coming, and she’s like, “Oh, I’ve got a song now!” Ugh. It’s so good.

Tequila Mockingbird: In Dragonquest we don’t get these epigraphs; instead we get date and time stamps and location stamps for where and when the following chapter is going to occur, which, on one hand, is an interesting departure and, on the other hand, does make sense because Dragonquest is so complicated in terms of, there are time jumps and we are all over the map, and you do have to be keeping track, but is also interesting because this book takes place entirely within Dragonquest. It’s not technically a sequel. It’s, I don’t know if there’s a — interquel?

Tequila Mockingbird: And, I, you were saying that the next book does, too, right? Dragonsinger is also…

Lleu: Yeah, so, both Dragonsong and Dragonsinger, the book that immediately follows it, are set during Dragonquest and include some marginally plot-important events. Other than — we see the Hatching from Menolly’s perspective; we also… Menolly has fou-, located, before she’s picked up by the dragon, another clutch of fire lizard eggs, which the Weyr is like, “Oh, my god, thank goodness! We needed more of these,” and so they’re gonna give out a bunch of them at the Hatching, and they give some of them, for example, to Masterharper Robinton. In Dragonquest there is no mention of this happening, there’s just, partway through the book, a passing mention of, like, “Ah, yes, then Robinton, with his new fire lizard —”

Tequila Mockingbird: I think it does mention that N’ton has some fire lizard eggs or they finally found more —

Tequila Mockingbird: — explanation of what, that Menolly was the one who found it, which, yeah.

Lleu: — or the distribution of it; it’s just like, yeah, Robinton’s got a fire lizard now, and you’re like, when did that happen?

Tequila Mockingbird: I mean, I would believe that that’s because she didn’t write it yet, right? She didn’t know Menolly was the one who found those —

Tequila Mockingbird: — fire lizard eggs when she wrote Dragonquest. And I do think it’s an interesting little peek into — and we will continue to see this — the complications of continuity that arise when you’re writing a 17- to 18-book series, much of which is taking place before and after and during each other. She’s not writing it —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. There’s definitely places where we’re gonna give her a little stick for the ways in which her continuity doesn’t hold up? But I do think that’s hard, and I think mostly she does a pretty solid job of it.

Lleu: On the note of continuity, one of the nice advantages of Dragonsong is that it includes, as Dragonflight and Dragonquest do, a foreword that explains the sci-fi premise of the book, and it also explains the whole plot of Dragonflight.

Lleu: — so you can, you can skip Dragonflight and Dragonquest, even, because all of the plot of Dragonquest is explained in Dragonsong, because Menolly gets to the Weyr and everyone’s in the middle of political crisis, and she’s like, “I don’t know what’s going on…”

Lleu: And finally someone sits down with her and is like, “Okay, here’s what’s happened over the last two weeks.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s big! Okay. And now I want to start talking about the place where we disagree on this book — ’cause so far we’ve just mostly been saying, “This book’s good and we like it!” — which is the family dynamics that we see in Half-Circle Sea Hold. And I want to start with a… I guess qualification, in that, I’m very much not saying that this is good parenting.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t even know that I’m saying that this is okay parenting, but I do think, for me, coming back to this book as an adult, I noticed several places where it felt like Menolly’s perception of what was going on was not accurate, where Menolly’s experiencing this as, “And my whole family hates me, and they’re all talking about me and how much they hate me, and they don’t want me here,” and I’m reading this going, “Oh, honey; you’re 15. They’re not thinking about it. Like, they’re not thoughtfully caring for you and trying to give you your wholeness of spirit in a way that you would like them to be, but they’re not maliciously destroying your life. They’re just not prioritizing you.”

Lleu: Yeah, I… I see where you’re coming from to some extent, but as I said when we —

Lleu: — talked about this previously, for me, the problem is, there are some moments where they absolutely are doing it maliciously. And the character that I’m most willing — other than her brother, who is very nice; we love him; I love him, in anyway — um, other than him, the character in her family who is most open to Menolly is her mother, and her mother does very much intentionally botch the healing — somewhat intentionally…

Tequila Mockingbird: I, see, I don’t know if it is. ’Cause what we get is Menolly thinking, “Oh, my god, it was on purpose” when she learns that in the Weyr they can hear that kind of injury much more effectively and safely —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because the tendon — basically, she cuts her hand, and this means, she thinks, that she can never play an instrument again, and then when she gets to the Weyr she’s receiving medical care for her feet, which she ran bloody trying to escape Thread, and she’s told, like, “Oh, no, the, the tendon isn’t cut, so you can get full movement back; it just needs to be treated better,” and she has this whole, like, “Oh, my gosh, my mother deliberately maimed me to try and prevent me from doing music.” But I flipped back through, and in the scene where Menolly does hurt her hand, we do get a little jump to her mom’s —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and her mom is thinking, like, “Fu—!” You know, like, her mom’s not cackling; her mom genuinely is like, “Oh, no, there’s packtail slime in that — it’s never gonna heal.”

Lleu: And I just can’t, can’t shake it. The other thing is everything that her mother does, right? Her mother never intervenes to protect her from her father, or almost never intervenes, and when she does it’s —

Tequila Mockingbird: — rather than confronting him, but I think that’s also a not uncommon pattern in —

Lleu: — and I’m not saying that Mavi is irredeemably evil; I’m just saying, and certainly is herself also a victim in this…

Lleu: …broader dynamic. But also that doesn’t mean that she is not also at fault for contributing to this dynamic with regards to Menolly.

Lleu: The other thing that particularly gets me is, there are multiple occasions throughout the book where Menolly clearly is correctly interpreting the situation, and her family is just sending her off. When the new Harper arrives, Menolly is assigned to care for an elderly relative who has some kind of dementia-type thing and so is a little vague on… what year it is, how old he is, things like that, at the back of the hall, so she’s out of sight. And her job is to keep him quiet, which is also an impossible task, and so when she inevitably fails at this task her older sister comes by and is like, “Ugh, f—, you can’t do anything right” and makes her help her take him up to his room and put him to bed and then is just like, “Now you just stay here and make sure he gets to sleep.” She’s clearly been banished by her family from the one environment where she’s able to hear music, the one thing that she cares about. And I’m like, that’s too much for me. You’ve lost me here, Mavi, even if you had any chance — whatever love you have for your daughter, you’ve squandered, for me, here.

Tequila Mockingbird: The biggest argument, to me, that it is a fundamentally unsalvageable situation, or the biggest strike against it is honestly that her brother, who does very clearly love and care for her, when she runs away, is kind of like, “Mm, I think it’s better that she stays lost. I think it is better for her to be living out without shelter from Threadfall in some kind of situation than to be rescued and brought back here.”

Lleu: Yeah, so, first of all when this is initially a possibility he’s obviously devastated, but also is like, “Maybe it — if she’s dead, maybe that’s better.” And when they find evidence that maybe she’s alive and the Harper’s like, “Oh, my god, is that,” like, “is that —”

Lleu: “— who I think it is,” and he’s, like, finally putting the pieces together, ’cause the Hold has been engaged in a kind of mass conspiracy to conceal the fact that Menolly was responsible for teaching the children after the old Harper died. And so the new Harper is like, “Oh, my god, there’s all this incredible music that was in the old Harper’s storage area. Who did this?” And no-one will tell him. In this moment they hear pipe music while they’re out sailing, and he’s like, “Oh, my god” — and he sees Menolly’s brother’s facial expression as he, the brother, puts together, like, “Oh, that is Menolly — that’s her piping; I recognize it.” And finally Elgion’s like, [snaps fingers] it clicks — “Oh, my god, I know what’s happening.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And Alemi’s line is, “If she’s alive, she’s happier away from the Hold! If she’s dead…” It doesn’t matter. Right?

Lleu: Yeah. So, like, that’s… If your brother who loves you thinks that you are better off dead than in your house…

Tequila Mockingbird: He’s saying, if she’s alive, this is for the best; if she’s dead, who cares?

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t think Alemi is saying she’s better off dead. I think he’s saying that either she’s dead, in which case it doesn’t matter, or she’s figured out a way to survive out of the Hold, in which case that’s where she should stay.

Lleu: Yeah. Either way, the takeaway is, this is not a good situation, and other people in the vicinity are aware of the fact that this is not a good situation.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it is interesting to me to wonder how much McCaffrey is looking at that as a… exposé, or yet another angle on Hold culture and the ways in which it is conservative and regressive and restrictive in a not great way, and how much that is just the trope of, of course your teenage-slash-child protagonist has to be fundamentally orphaned so that they can go on and be a protagonist. But I do think in this it’s maybe more the former than the latter, because she could still go away and be a Harper with a loving and supportive family, right? That’s not necessary to the narrative structure. So I think this is also McCaffrey taking the opportunity again to really give us a different, new perspective on Hold life and Weyr life —

Lleu: And it’s especially interesting because there’s a marked contrast between th-, Hold life in Half-Circle Sea Hold and other visions of Hold life that we get in later books, so that not only is life in Holds markedly different from life in the Weyrs, which have been the focus of the first two books, but life in the Holds also is regionally varied. Half-Circle is particularly isolated and so perhaps inevitably particularly conservative, but —

Tequila Mockingbird: I also just think we’re not supposed to like Yanus, like, he’s —

Lleu: Yes, we’re also definitely not supposed to like Yanus Sea Holder, specifically. But in contrast, we see a lot of life at Fort Hold, which is much larger and was the first of the Northern Continent settlements, 2000-some years ago, in Dragonsinger, and it’s clear that this is a place that is much more cosmopolitan.

Lleu: People are much more liberal, there’s a lot more trade, rather than, “People come through the marshes once a year.” There —

Tequila Mockingbird: A very different perspective, and even different from what we see of Ruatha Hold, which is very, small but also they have a lot of pride in their work and it’s clear that Lytol is running things well, and Jaxom’s a little bored, but it’s not a bad environment, and he feels loved and supported.

Lleu: Yeah, as the series goes on we get this much greater sense of variation across Pern. We are truly — if I can be an academic for a moment, one of the things that —

Lleu: — one of the things that the sci-fi critic Darko Suvin, whose work I am not always a fan of, says in one of his essays about fantasy, which he didn’t like, is that fantasy has a tendency to show us a world but not a society.

Lleu: And I think Pern in particular does an excellent job of illustrating what he means by that. We are seeing, in Pern, a society —

Lleu: — it’s not a world. There’s world-building, but the world-building is showing us a —

Lleu: — with a history, with a historical context, with the possibility of social change, and with these internal social variations, in a way that’s not just, like, “Oh, yes, people from the desert are like this —”

Lleu: “— and people from the sea coast are like this.” Where she’s clearly actually put some thought into what this world would be like to live in, and not just what this world is like aesthetically.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think it is part of her long-term project, right, of looking at, “Okay, how is this society going to change?”

Tequila Mockingbird: And some of that comes from showing us, “Why does it need to change?”

Tequila Mockingbird: We see in Dragonflight the stagnant, hide-bound, to use the reference that they use a little too much, Weyr culture, and the way that it needs to be shaken up and reawakened and revitalized by F’lar and Lessa, and —

Lleu: Yeah, something that Dragonquest then follows up on in much more detail.

Tequila Mockingbird: And now we’re seeing, okay, the Holds also need a little bit of a shake-up, and I think we also see — more in Dragonquest — that the Crafts need a shake-up. It’s sort of this, “Okay, we’ve been in this rut for 400 years,” um —

Lleu: Yeah, and on the one hand we’ve been growing, expanding, doing new science, building new buildings, but also there hasn’t —

Lleu: Yeah, and Dragonsinger also is in part about — Menolly is the “first female Harper,” which we later learn is not the case, but there’s some controversy —

Lleu: — about that even among the Harpers, who are the most progressive of the Crafts. Speaking of Crafts, let’s talk about labor, which is in this book not really a matter of Crafts.

Tequila Mockingbird: This book finally answers the question that I ask every time I read a fantasy book, to hop back to your “worlds vs. societies”: who’s cooking all this food, this feast? Where does this come from? How many peasants are supporting your knight in shining armor, and where do they live?

Lleu: Yeah. So, in Dragonflight and Dragonquest, we had evidence of this, right?

Lleu: Lessa interacts with Manora, who is the “headwoman,” quote-unquote, at the Weyr and so is responsible for all these logistical things.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it’s mostly in this obstacle way, where you just get a scene where Manora’s like, “Oh, no, we don’t have enough food!” and then Lessa has to go and do some politics to get more food.

Lleu: Yeah. She’s interested in the political economy of Pern, but not in the day-to-day realities of what it’s like to actually work in the kitchen, and Dragonsong is very interested in what it’s like to actually work in the kitchen.

Tequila Mockingbird: Not only do we see more about the rhythms there, but also the technology there. We have, I think, an automatic spit-turner, but we’re hand-washing the dishes, and, yes, we have ovens, but we don’t have… You know. So it’s this interesting look into the technology of the kitchen and also really a look into the characters, some of whom we’ve met before, but very much as archetypes or just as roles, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: We’ve met Manora, whose job it is to do this; we’ve met Mirrim, who is a plucky youth. And now they both get to actually be people for a little bit.

Lleu: Yeah. I mean, Manora still gets to be a mother, but Mirrim in particular gets to be not just a plucky youth but a teenage girl who’s extremely worried about her foster-mother, Brekke, because she’s at this point catatonic because her queen dragon just died, like, two weeks ago, and also is desperately in need of another friend her age, and Menolly arrives at exactly the right time to become friends with Mirrim. And they continue to be friends even when Mirrim becomes kind of horrible in the later books.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think it’s also fun because this is happening while all of the drama of the finale of Dragonquest is going down, or a little bit before the finale, maybe.

Tequila Mockingbird: We get to really deepen that and draw it out, because we see Mirrim’s grief and we see the community’s grief — to your point —

Tequila Mockingbird: — Menolly rocks up and is like, “Uh-oh,” you know, this —

Lleu: Like, “Clearly something has happened and I don’t know what it is and I’m a little too afraid to ask,” but she does finally work up the courage and is like, “Who’s Brekke?” And someone in the kitchen is like, —

Tequila Mockingbird: To what you were saying in the last episode about the way that McCaffrey so effectively conveys the horror of two queen dragons essentially killing each other, and here we get to again just steep in the community horror of that —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and the way that this entire community has been deeply shaken by this tragedy, and not just a tragedy but something wrong.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think again it’s building that society, it’s building their social mores by showing us how they are reacting to something so far outside of them.

Lleu: Yeah. That also leads us to what I think is one of the other quite affecting moments in the series. Dragonquest does narrate — they offer Brekke as a new candidate to Impress the new queen dragon, because they’re like, “She’s so good at talking to dragons” — she has this extra-strong telepathy, basically, not unlike Lessa — “we need her.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And also she’s catatonic with grief and this might help.

Lleu: And also she’s catatonic with grief and this might help. And F’nor and Manora and Mirrim are all convinced that this would be horrible, this would be the worst thing that could possibly happen, and Brekke, when she’s no longer catatonic, also says, like, “That would have been the worst thing I can possibly imagine.” And what happens at the Hatching is, she walks out — she’s led out, rather — and all of the other candidates for the queen dragon step aside, the queen dragon emerges and takes a step towards Brekke, and then her fire lizard flies in and starts essentially screaming at the queen dragon, who then leaves. And it’s this really touching moment where we see, like, “Oh, these” — it’s hard — I can’t even explain it, really, why this to me feels so —

Tequila Mockingbird: — you see that the fire lizards love them, too? Although this is a deeper — because I think it’s been, “Oh, cool, fire lizards! This is so fun!”

Lleu: And I think, for me it’s — so, the fire lizard yells at the queen dragon and then this moment brings Brekke out of her catatonia and she says, “Berd” — the name of the fire lizard — “don’t!” and then finally moves of her own volition for the first time in two weeks. And Menolly is overcome by this — and I get it, in a way that objectively it’s not —

Tequila Mockingbird: And I also think in Dragonquest, yes, you get the same sequence of events, but that’s not really the focus, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: And also you’re learning about it for the first time and there’s plot going on, where here you’re just sitting in Menolly reacting to that and seeing that and being like, “Oh, okay, this is what it means to have a fire lizard —”

Lleu: Also Menolly, for whom this is of substantial importance to the first friend of her own age that she’s ever had in her life.

Lleu: ’Cause she’s sitting with Mirrim watching this, desperate for it to work out one way or another.

Tequila Mockingbird: This is a big jump, but it’s really fun to meet Lessa from someone else’s perspective who’s just like, “Oh, my god, she’s terrifying!” ’Cause, yeah, that feels right. But also, that’s part of, I think, the fun of a long book series with multiple points of view, is, you do get to see the same event from multiple perspectives, or the same characters from outside and inside perspectives. And I think it’s the sort of thing where I suspect that publishing is maybe moving away a little bit from the long, complicated fantasy series, —

Tequila Mockingbird: — sci-fi series. I don’t know if you could publish Pern today. Right? Like —

Tequila Mockingbird: — right? There would not be the pathway for this kind of storytelling. But I think that it can be really lovely, and it can offer something really special to have an author work with the same world and the same stable of characters for 20 years and come back and reassess and reexamine and explore and expand.

Lleu: Yeah. In a way that’s interestingly not linear — this is not The Wheel of Time, our 14-book epic sci-fi narrative. It’s — however many books; I should know off the top of my head, but I don’t.

Lleu: Okay, yeah, so 18 books, but not necessarily in any order. The books often at least partially overlap with one another, as Dragonsong does with Dragonquest, so she started early with that. It doesn’t have that —

Tequila Mockingbird: “We’re just telling a really long single story” — we really are telling a multitude of stories.

Lleu: — rather than the story of any of the individual characters in Pern, although there are people who continue to be —

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do suspect that this was the template for other authors who went on to do this.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I was reading them all at the same time, because I was reading them in the ’90s, so to me, you know, Mercedes Lackey and Lois McMaster Bujold and Anne McCaffrey were all, “Oh, yeah, long, connected sci-fi/fantasy series that jumps around,” but actually, probably, both of those women were able to do that because —

Tequila Mockingbird: Because both of them play the same game of, “I’m gonna build a world and really explore it from all across its chronology; I’m gonna have different point of view; I’m gonna circle back to the same characters; I’m gonna overlap” — all these kind of strategies of storytelling and world-building that McCaffrey was innovating in some interesting ways.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s the same world, but I don’t think he’s jumping around as much.

Tequila Mockingbird: I have not read Dune and I’m not going to, but I thought that they marched forward in chronology. I think they —

Tequila Mockingbird: — sense of, like, I’m building a world and exploring different aspects of it —

Lleu: Right, yeah. The “Hainish Cycle” doesn’t really overlap in the same way, and Earthsea again was written over a much longer timescale even though A Wizard of Earthsea is also contemporary with Dragonflight, 1968. Also originally published by a children’s publisher, but the later books I think not.[5]

Tequila Mockingbird: Hmm. It’s an interesting time in American spec fic publishing, and I think you can broadly talk about a shift in the way these books were being published.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I do think she had a few good ideas. She had some real bad ideas.

Lleu: Okay, I have a couple small things that I want to talk about. The first of them is names. We actually had to stop and rerecord briefly —

Lleu: And I think that this is for good reason, because here, and increasingly as the series goes on, we start to see characters whose names are suspiciously like names that are familiar to us, but with a letter or two switched or a vowel changed. And I think this is 100% intentional, in particular because later on[6] we get a character whose name is “K’van,” a dragonrider, and then several books after his first appearance, we have a dragonrider —

Lleu: — 2,000 years ago named “K’vin,” whose name clearly was originally “Kevin.” And I’m like, “Oh, K’van is just future Kevin. She did that on purpose.” Menolly, Melanie — I think the fact that those are so similar is 100% intentional —

Tequila Mockingbird: — it’s those same little dramatic irony moments; these same little pings of, “This is sci-fi” — well, “This is futuristic fantasy.” This is taking place in a world that had a society that looked a lot like ours thousands of years ago.

Tequila Mockingbird: This is a long time in the future in a galaxy far, far away.

Tequila Mockingbird: We haven’t, also, even really talked about the dragonrider name thing.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which maybe is better left for another book, ’cause…

Tequila Mockingbird: — and in The White Dragon, and all of that. But she has some interesting world-building with dragonrider names. There are some names that just sound like, “Okay, this is just a weird old fantasy name.” And then there are the ones where we’re like, “Wait a moment…” But there is also the convention that you mix your children’s names?

Tequila Mockingbird: You mix your parents’ names to get the name of your children. So she was doing Renesmé 50 years before Renesmee was doing Renesmee. It’s a mix of names that maybe come from that and names that don’t.

Lleu: Yeah. Names that we vaguely recognize or that ping as familiar, and names where you’re like —

Lleu: — “Who thought this was a good idea?” It seems to be especially common in Weyrs, but also, at the very least, has spread beyond Weyrs.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Admittedly, in a Weyr they know that there’s a high likelihood that the name is gonna end up being changed if they become a dragonrider, so…

Lleu: However, okay, the other thing I wanted to talk — well, one of the other small things I wanted to talk about is, um…

Lleu: Yes. The representation of dragons in this. Because I love the dragons always. In Dragonflight, we don’t really get a ton of Ramoth and —

Lleu: — Mnementh is stuck with F’lar, unfortunately, and that limits his ability to be what dragons are. Canth in Dragonquest, F’nor’s dragon, is much closer, but also there’s the weird stuff with Brekke going on that detracts from it. Here, there’s no romance; there’s no anything getting in the way. All we have is one of the dragonriders, T’gellan, takes Menolly back to her cave to retrieve her stuff and also locate the fire lizard eggs, make sure they’re still intact. And while they’re in the cave, suddenly the light goes out, and they’re like, “Uh…what’s going on?” And they look back, and T’gellan’s dragon, Monarth, has stuck his head into the cave entrance ’cause he feels left out and he wants to see what’s going on. And T’gellan’s like, “Monarth, we can’t see. You have to move.”

Tequila Mockingbird: — specifically, a dumb, you know, “You big dummy,” or something. “You big dumb brute.”

Lleu: — sort of sulkingly takes his head away. The dragons are just giant lizard-cats, and I love them so much. I want one.

Tequila Mockingbird: And really, that is central to the project of the Dragonriders of Pern and a key part of its success, is, I want a dragon. I want a fire lizard. It’s just so appealing.

Tequila Mockingbird: That, the whole psychic animal buddy who loves you unconditionally and also does cool magic with you — she really tapped into something with that.

Lleu: Yeah. But also, specifically, they’re just giant cats. They like to sleep in the sun, and…

Tequila Mockingbird: They want to be scratched, but if you scratch them in the wrong way they will bite you.

Lleu: Ugh. They’re so good. Anyway. Final thing I want to talk about is, we talked a fair amount in Dragonquest about sexuality. Not present here explicitly. However, I just want to flag —

Lleu: — that T’gellan and G’sel’s relationship and their interactions? They’ve extremely fucked before. They just have. When Menolly is rescued, coincidentally the new Harper is also out and about in a boat and shouldn’t be and gets picked up by dragonriders as well. And he’s having dinner at the Weyr, and he’s introduced to a fire lizard for the first time by T’gellan, the rider who has rescued him. The fire lizard belongs to G’sel, who is a green rider — and so gay — who we met briefly in Dragonquest as one of the first people who Impressed a fire lizard:

Lleu: “‘This is Rill, Harper,’ G’sel said, extending his arm to Elgion. ‘Rill, be courteous; he’s a Harper.’

Lleu: “With great dignity, the fire lizard extended his wings, executing what Elgion construed to be a bow, while the jeweled eyes regarded him intently. Not knowing how one saluted a fire lizard, Legion tentatively extended his hand.

Lleu: “‘Scratch his eye ridges,’ G’sel suggested. ‘They all love that.’

Lleu: “To Elgion’s delight and amazement, the fire lizard accepted the caress, and as Elgion’s stroking eased an itch, Rill’s eyelids began to close in sensuous pleasure.”

Tequila Mockingbird: — and I am reminding you, lizards do fuck in this book. That is the sex scene that we get.

Lleu: “‘He’s another convert,’ said T’gellan, laughing and pulling out his chair. The noise roused the fire lizard from somnolence and he hissed softly at T’gellan.”

Lleu: “‘They’re bold creatures, too, you’ll notice, Harper, with no respect for degree.’

Lleu: “This was evidently an old jibe, for G’sel, seating himself, paid it no heed, but coaxed Rill to step onto a padded shoulder rest so he could eat the dinner now being served.”

Lleu: And so they have a little conversation, and Elgion asks about sending messages; G’sel says,

Lleu: “‘I can ask Rill to carry a message to any place he’s already been. No, to a person he knows at another Hold or Weyr I’ve taken him to. He follows me no matter where I go. Even during Threadfall.’ At T’gellan’s snort, G’sel added, ‘I told you to watch today, T’gellan. Rill was with us.’

Lleu: “‘Yes, so tell Elgion how long it takes Rill to come back from delivering a message.’

Lleu: “‘All right; all right,’ said G’sel with a laugh as he stroked Rill affectionately. ‘And when you’ve one of your own, T’gellan…’

Lleu: — they’ve had sex before. It’s. Yeah. Anyway. That’s all. We’re done. Uh…

Tequila Mockingbird: And closing on that note. This is gonna really depart from our usual standard, because if we’ve awakened your nostalgia or made you curious, actually do go read Dragonsong! It’s kinda one of the only ones that’s good. But if you have already read Dragonsong, or if you’re in the mood for even more of that child feels misunderstood at home and so runs away and lives in the wilderness satisfactorily, because I was definitely a My Side of the Mountain / Hatchet / the first book of The Boxcar Children and then furious when they got rescued —

Tequila Mockingbird: — from their boxcar and lived, like, normal, boring lives —

Tequila Mockingbird: — um, kind of a kid, I would like to recommend Mandy, by Julie Andrews — yes, that Julie Andrews — which is, a little orphan girl who runs away slash sneaks away from her orphanage to an abandoned summer cottage and cleans it up, and it’s just a charming little story about adoption and finding a place for yourself in the world.

Lleu: And I don’t have a recommendation. I love Dragonsong — it’s so good. I would highly recommend it, even if you’re an adult, even if you’ve never read the series before — just go read it. It’s worth it. Don’t read any of the other ones, other than the se-, the immediate sequel, Dragonsinger, which is also very good.

Tequila Mockingbird: Thanks for listening to this episode of Dragons Made Me Do It! If you enjoyed it and want to hear more, you can follow us on tumblr at dmmdipodcast.tumblr.com for updates, or to send us questions or comments, and you can find our archive of episodes, along with transcripts, recommendations, funny memes, and more at dmmdipodcast.neocities.org — N E O cities.

[2] Actually, a quick Google Books search for “the tears i feel today i'll wait to shed tomorrow” turns up three different poetry collections that do this, which, since not everything is indexed on Google Books, probably means there are more out there. They are, to be fair to small presses, all self-published.

[3] We realized after the fact that Lleu was thinking of a different passage, where Alemi does, in fact, explicitly say Menolly would be better off dead than in Half-Circle (though he hopes she’s alive and living well elsewhere):

“I’ve some time. Where would you suggest I look?” Hope flashed in Alemi’s eyes, then as suddenly wariness clouded them.

“I’d say it’s better if Menolly remains where she is...”

“Dead or hurt?”

“Aye.” Alemi sighed deeply. “And I wish her luck and long life.”

“Then you think she’s alive and chooses to be without Hold?”

Alemi regarded the Harper quietly. “I think she’s alive and better off wherever she is than she would be in Half-Circle.”

[5] We realized belatedly that we were a bit unclear in this discussion of series length: Asimov’s Foundation series (e.g.) is arguably longer-running than Pern (1942-1993, vs. 1967-2003), but there was a 29-year period from Second Foundation in 1953 to Foundation’s Edge in 1982 where there was no new Foundation material, whereas the longest gap between Pern stories was the four years between Dragondrums in 1979 and Moreta in 1983. Likewise, Le Guin’s Earthsea had an 18-year gap between The Farthest Shore in 1972 and Tehanu in 1990 (and then another eight years between Tehanu and “Dragonfly” in 1998).

(Re the “Hainish Cycle,” in addition to having a 16-year gap between The Dispossessed in 1974 and “The Shobies’ Story” in 1990, Le Guin explicitly did not regard it as a cohesive series or cycle, though she acknowledged commonalities of setting.)

In other words, the difference isn’t the extent of time or the time period of publication, but rather the fact that other earlier or contemporary series published over a long timespan were released much more intermittently, while Pern was published more or less continuously for 35 years. If Earthsea is a series of snapshots of Le Guin’s changing thoughts about Earthsea, Pern is the publishing equivalent of a liveblog.

[6] At the time we recorded this episode we had not yet planned to to the short fiction bonus episodes and had not previously read “The Smallest Dragonboy,” so we though K’van’s first real appearance was in The Renegades of Pern.

[7] Both Tequila’s hard copy and the sketchy ebooks Lleu has access to have “his hissed” rather than “he hissed.”